A Nature Inspired Guidance Method for Improving Social Acceptance of Urban Air Mobility

Abstract

This work introduces a nature-inspired guidance method to enhance social acceptance of urban air mobility. A dynamic crowd avoidance feature is integrated to the guidance algorithm to improve safety, reduce noise, and enhance positive public perception. To further improve the safety of the system, an emergency landing mode is introduced. To perform landing maneuver and fully utilize the urban airspace, the guidance algorithm is extended from 2D to 3D while maintaining real-time capability and low computational load. Scaled hardware experiments are conducted to asses the effectiveness of the proposed guidance approach. Experiments demonstrate effective crowd avoidance and emergency landing while ensuring collision and obstacle avoidance. Proposed enhancements show potential to promote public acceptance of urban air mobility systems by improving safety while maintaining efficiency.